Software Carpentry Spin Offs

09/13/2001

The Software
Carpentry project is an effort to create better engineering
tools. Sponsored by the Advanced Computing Laboratory and with
additional prizes offered by O'Reilly, Addison Wesley, and Red Hat,
Software Carpentry held a contest last year. Prizes were to go to the best
designers of a configuration tool to replace autoconf, a build tool to
replace make, a testing tool to replace xunit, and an issue tracking
tool to replace gnats and bugzilla.

Winners of three of the contests were announced but not with much
fanfare. As money began to dry up in the tech industry, the contest
began to fall into obscurity. Greg Wilson, who initially directed the
project, left the project late last year for other employment. The
project web site and mailing lists have not seen much action since. It
contains the winning submissions for three of the tracks, but not for
the test track, which was to undergo another round of submissions.
The projects current director, Mark Mitchell of Code Sourcery, tells
me that they intentionally left the site dormant, but that they have
been working on builds of the winning submissions for testing and
tracking, QMTest and QMTrack. They expect to release beta versions
soon.

Some people aren't waiting. Richard Jones has announced an
independent project to build the winner of the issue tracking
category, Ka-Ping Yee's Roundup. Jones
initial 0.2.2 release in July has been followed by several updates and
is currently at version 0.2.8. Installation is fairly straightforward,
though you have to manually edit some files to get it to work. It
would have been easier with some information on what exactly an
"instance home" is. It's the directory that will contain an issues
database. Like most fledgling projects, this one is still weak on
documentation, but the specifications used in the contest help
immensely, explaining how things are meant to work.

Another impatient developer is Steven Knight. On August 17 he
announced the SCons
project, based on his winning entry in the Build contest. SCons is
mostly a Python implementation of the Perl Cons tool. Knight
says,

Cons has the great strength and weakness of
being implemented in Perl.[..] The idea of a Python version of the
Cons architecture had been kicked around in the past, and I thought
the idea was attractive and worth pursuing. [..] I spent the first
part of this year coding some SCons infrastructure in my spare time,
experimenting with different ideas and trying to learn enough Python
on my own. [B]y June I felt comfortable going public.

Knight is looking for some developers to join him in his efforts
Besides some good, pragmatic Python coding skills, he is is looking
for people familiar with Visual C++/Developer Studio experience, a
Java build expert, and experience building software for MacOS.

I am eager to see QMTest and QMTrack, Particularly QMTest. The
winner of the Test contest was never announced on the Software
Carpentry site. What will it look like? With QMTest three of the four categories will be on their way to working tools. All we
would need to complete the set is for someone to implement Lindsay
Todd's Site and Platform Customization Administration Tool, SapCat,
the winner of the configuration contest. But, even without it, I think
Software Carpentry's mission to create a new generation of Software
Engineering tools has been a success. It set the wheels in
motion.